Chinese is a group of related language dialects that form one of the branches of the Sino-Tibetan language family. In many cases, speakers of different dialects do not understand each other. Chinese is spoken by the majority of Chinese and by many other ethnic groups in China. Nearly 1.4 billion people (about 19% of the world's population) speak Chinese in one form or another. This article will tell you some aspects of Chinese grammar and its features and history in general.
Dialectism of Chinese
Varieties of Chinese are usually described by native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, but linguists note that they are as diverse as the language family.
The dialectal diversity of Chinese is reminiscent of the various Romance languages. There are several major regional dialects of Chinese (depending on the classification scheme), of which the most common is:
- Mandarin or Standard Chinese (about 960 millioncarriers, the entire southwestern region of China communicates on it);
- Wu dialect (80 million speakers, common in Shanghai, for example);
- Ming dialect (70 million, for example, the dialect is spoken outside of China, in Taiwan and other overseas territories);
- Yue dialect (60 million speakers, otherwise called Cantonese) and others.
Most of these dialects are mutually incomprehensible, and even dialects within the Ming group are not intelligible to speakers of one or another Minsk dialect. However, the Xiang dialect and some southwestern Mandarin dialects may share terms and a certain degree of similarity. All differences lie in tonality and some grammatical aspects. Although the practical Chinese grammar of all dialects has many similarities, there are some differences.
Standard Mandarin
Standard Chinese is a unified form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing Mandarin dialect. It is the official language of China and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore. Modern Chinese grammar is based on this system. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The written form of the standard language, based on logograms known as Chinese characters, is common to all dialects.
Classification of Chinese
Most linguists classify all varieties of Chineselanguage as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, along with Burmese, Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and Southeast Asia. Although the relationship between these languages was first established in the early 19th century and is now widely studied, the Sino-Tibetan family is much less studied than the Indo-European and Austroasiatic ones. Difficulties include the wide variety of languages, the lack of inflections in many of them, and the lack of language contacts. In addition, many minor languages are spoken in remote mountainous regions, which are often vulnerable border areas as well. Without a reliable reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the top-level structure of this language family remains unclear.
Chinese phonetic system
Chinese is often described as a "monosyllabic" language, meaning one word has one syllable. However, this is only partly true. This is a largely accurate description of Classical Chinese and Medieval Chinese. In Classical Chinese, approximately 90% of words actually correspond to one syllable and one character. In modern varieties of Chinese, as a rule, a morpheme (a unit of meaning) is one syllable. In contrast, English has many polysyllabic morphemes, both related and free. Some of the more conservative Southern Chinese are mostly monosyllabic, especially among the words in the basic vocabulary.
In Mandarin (standardized versionpronunciation and writing of hieroglyphs), most nouns, adjectives and verbs are mostly two-syllable. A significant reason for this is phonological attrition. Phonetic changes over time steadily reduce the number of possible syllables. In modern Mandarin, there are currently only about 1,200 possible syllables, including tonal differences, compared to about 5,000 syllables in Vietnamese (still mostly a monosyllabic language). This phonetic shortage of sounds has led to a corresponding increase in the number of homophones, that is, words that sound the same. Most modern varieties of Chinese tend to form new words by joining several syllables together. In some cases, one-syllable words have become two-syllable.
Chinese Grammar
Chinese morphology is strictly related to many syllables with a rather rigid construction. While many of these monosyllabic morphemes may be single words, they most often form polysyllabic compounds that more closely resemble the traditional Western word. A Chinese "word" may consist of more than one morpheme character, usually two, but may be three or more. This is an elementary grammar of Chinese.
For example:
- yún云/雲 - "cloud";
- hànbǎobāo, hànbǎo汉堡包/漢堡包, 汉堡/漢堡 – "hamburger";
- wǒ我 - "I, me";
- rén人 –"people, man, humanity";
- dìqiú 地球 – "Earth";
- shǎndiàn 闪电/閃電 - "lightning";
- mèng梦/夢 – "dream".
All varieties of modern Chinese dialect languages are analytic languages because they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology. That is, changes in the form of the word - to indicate the function of the word in the sentence. In other words, there are very few inflectional grammatical endings in Chinese. In this group of languages, there is no such thing as verb tense, no grammatical voices, no numbers (singular, plural, although there are plural markers, for example, for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (equivalents that exist in English).
Chinese often use grammatical markers to show the aspect and mood of a verb. In Chinese, this is due to the use of particles such as le 了 (perfect), hái 还 / 還 (still), yǐjīng 已经 / 已經 (already) and others.
Syntax Features
Theoretical Chinese grammar provides for the following word order: subject-verb-object, like many other languages in East Asia. Special constructions called comments are often used to form various clarifications in sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of special classifiers and counters that are a hallmark of Oriental languages such as Japanese andKorean. Another notable feature of the Chinese grammar, characteristic of all varieties of Mandarin, is the use of a serial construction of verbs (several connected verbs in one word describe one phenomenon), the use of a "zero pronoun". Of course, Chinese grammar exercises are required to consolidate these grammatical features.
Chinese Vocabulary
From antiquity, there are over 20,000 hieroglyphs, of which about 10,000 are commonly used today. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are more words in Chinese than there are characters. A better term in this sense would be a morpheme, since they represent the smallest grammatical units, individual meanings and/or syllables in Chinese.
Number of characters in Chinese
Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and expressions vary greatly. One of the authoritative collections of Chinese characters includes 54,678 characters, including even ancient characters. With 85,568 characters, the Beijing Handbook is the largest reference work based solely on Literary Chinese.
Chinese grammar for beginners is quite difficult, those who want to master this unique language will have to learn all the linguistic subtleties.
